What Sparks Poetry

 

Claudia Rojas 

Closing this past winter, I’ve been studying ambiguous loss, a grief term about paradox. Reading Victoria Chang’s obituary voicemail poem, I felt closer to her experience with grief as each line processed a failed transcription. The poem reminds me that language is a tool, yet a machine is unable to process the nuisance of language the way a human would. The poem asks me as a reader to question the way language works, and in doing so, forces me to reflect that language is so humane, filled with potential and failure.

 

 

 

“The Last Himalayan Beekeeper” is family, and place, and displacement, and the incredible knowing of the ghosts and the heritage and tradition—that “last hive”– that is carried from homelands to new places, through conflict to the next fragile peace. There are, in my sprawling clan of white colonialist heritage (tempered by valued additions of diverse gene pools) all the fictions and fact that flow into the messy patches of the family quilt that are no longer connected by juniper, smoke, beekeeping, and the immediate experience of conflict and tyranny, but by traditions of sharing of craft and lore. And perhaps it is because among the herbalists, beekeepers, artists, and yes, poets— there is ever a matriarch and those she calls to carry the better traditions on into a world that honors the roots of our rituals less than the flash of display, the preparation for war more than the nurturing of peace.   

 

I carry this poem with me now as I carry a childhood lived in foreign places, speaking tongues other than that of my clan. I bought the book and read it without knowing that I would meet this poem again after a journey through pages of extraordinary words in a language not native to the poet and yet utterly mastered by him. It was still its own pause, and the book is its own whole. I have shared and will share this gift always.

 

 

 

 

Growing up in an Indian household, kajal was often the solution to a plethora of problems: exhausted eyes, insecurity, even superstitious protection to ward off the evil eye. Applying kohl was also a practice passed down generations, often by someone older. I was stunned by how Nezhukumatathil revisits this practice only to render beauty as a tool that makes us complicit. Having begun with an unassuming title, followed by the ‘loveliness’ of a sari, the poet launches us into the upward gaze of girls, likely victims of sex trafficking, and confines us to “each slight wobble of fan blade”. What pulled me most toward this piece are the white spaces created by the caesura, which enact a series of containments—of breath, of movement, of thought. Here, everything gathers around a single, haunting simile—the kohl-lined eyes as “two moths”—fragile yet luminous. What lingers is not only the violence but the unsettling transformation of that violence into ornament—the kohl-lined eyes, that too applied by a sisterly figure. Here, fragility and adornment blur, implicating the gaze of the reader itself. 

 

 

 

 

I didn’t expect “Sleeper” to stop me. But it did. Krisztina Tóth’s poem is addressed to someone who has died, or is dying, and I came to it expecting the usual elegiac architecture: grief, absence, the naming of the dead, the address to an indifferent nature, the hard-won peace that the living need more than the dead deserve. What I found instead was a poem almost violently preoccupied with the body. The lungs become “a huge pink cloud,” the throat “a dripping valley”, the uvula a “stalactite”. Even the soul, at the poem’s end, is imagined not as light or spirit but as “an empty flask of pills” drifting through a thinning sky.

 

That image altered something. Tóth dismantles the consolation of the body being left behind at death. Dying, in her poem, is not an exit from the flesh: it’s a further estrangement within it. The Sleeper hasn’t escaped the physical world. They’ve been pulled deeper into it, past the point where any name still holds.

 

Good poems don’t release you. This one pressed something back into me I hadn’t known was loose.

 

A list poem succeeds through accumulation—enumerated items suggesting, collectively, a larger idea, or a loftier one. One less easily named. In “Gestational Size Equivalency Chart,” Catherine Pierce riffs on another kind of list that likens a growing fetus to progressively larger fruits. It’s an attempt to make the first act of parenting feel familiar and orderly. The poem’s comparisons, however, are fantastical and where I expect reassurance, Pierce piles on uncertainty that refuses to be measured. My baby is the size of the Gravitron’s wildness. Of my wild relief when I manage to hang on.